Taiwan’s troubles with democracy near tipping point

'It would be more to the point for Taiwan to address the fundamental problems with its constitution and political structure, which have been said, jokingly, to embody the worst aspects of the French and American systems.'

Taiwan is one of a handful of countries that have successfully made the transition from authoritarian, military rule to vigorous and functional democracy.

Over my 40 years as a foreign correspondent, I have lost count of the number of countries where I have reported on the outpourings of hope and expectation as the old colonial flag came down for the last time, or the generals vacated the presidential palace.

In few of those cases have the hopes been met. And if they have, it has taken a couple of generations, and a lot of angst and violence, before something like democracy has taken root.

The island nation of Taiwan with its 23 million people is one of the exceptions.

But 31 years after martial law was lifted, and 22 years after the transition to democracy was completed with the direct election of the president, Taiwan is stumbling into democratic confusion.

The reasons flow from Taiwan’s dramatic political and constitutional history. But they carry broader warnings.

They point to the essential weakness of democracies based on rule by an executive president.

It seems nearly impossible to avoid political gridlock and social ruptures from clashes between activist presidents and the legislative and judicial institutions designed to curb the leader’s power.

The frustrated-president syndrome is currently most evident in United States.

While Donald Trump has stretched his authority to issue executive orders and deploy the military in order to bypass the checks on his authoritarian instincts, Taiwan is confronting a different problem, but one from the same root stock.

Taiwan’s looming problem is an excess of democracy. It has a referendum system that makes it excessively easy to get a question put on the ballot of other elections, and excessively easy for the results to be valid. On top of that, the results are legally binding on the government.

This puts unwarranted power in the hands of well-organized and -funded special interest groups of one sort or another.

This threat is going to be evident on Nov. 24, when there will be 10 referendums accompanying local government elections. The topics cover a wide range of issues, from banning same-sex marriages and giving schoolchildren information about homosexuality, to reversing the intended closure of Taiwan’s nuclear power plants. Other questions seek support for lowering electricity output from thermal power plants and banning the importation of food from places in Japan close to Fukushima, where a nuclear power plant was hit by an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

The results of the referendums are likely to land the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration of President Tsai Ing-wen with conflicting legal requirements or demands over which the government has little or no control.

More damaging in the future will be the undermining of political culture. It is not healthy when well-organized civic groups, activists and special interests can override the authority of the administration and parliament — the Legislative Yuan. This will lead inevitably to the erosion of public confidence in Taiwan’s political culture.

It’s already clear that the ease with which referendums can be floated will make it more difficult for any government to manage the all-consuming issue for any Taiwanese government: its relationship with China, which claims to own Taiwan, is attempting to isolate the island diplomatically and economically, and threatens to invade it.

The threat is real. The nationalist wing of the DPP is fed up with fancy footwork and obfuscation successive Taiwanese governments of both main political parties have pursued to avoid a confrontation with Beijing.

The strong nationalist wing of the DPP, known as the “Deep Greens,” wants an end to this shadow boxing. They want a clear referendum saying that Taiwan should declare formal independence.

For decades, polls have shown consistently that around 90 per cent of Taiwanese want to keep their independence, though about half those would prefer to do it without confronting Beijing.

So it’s not a foregone conclusion that a referendum on declaring legal independence would pass, but there is more than a reasonable chance it would.

As things stand, this would be legally binding on Tsai and her administration and would undoubtedly precipitate a clash with Beijing. It would quickly become a regional crisis, as the U.S. and Japan faced their political and treaty obligations to support Taiwan.

From there, things could get out of hand very fast if Australia, South Korea, Vietnam and other U.S. allies got involved.

Taiwan got to this predicament along a very similar path to the one that has Trump governing by presidential decree.

In the 2000 election, the then-opposition DPP candidate Chen Shui-bian won the presidency. But there was a breakdown in the relationship with parliament, which was still held by the Kuomintang, the old Nationalist party of China, which seized power in Taiwan when leader Chiang Kai-shek and his army fled to the island after losing the civil war to the communists in 1949.

To try to create some leverage over the Legislative Yuan, Chen’s DPP introduced a Referendum Act. The Kuomintang-dominated parliament passed the bill, but only after adding amendments making it difficult for referendums to be valid, such as requiring at least 50 per cent voter turnout.

Thus when two referendums were added to the 2004 national ballots, one demanding that China renounce the use of force against Taiwan and the other calling for state-to-state peace negotiations, both failed.

They failed, despite people having voted 91.8 per cent in favour of the first question and 92 per cent in favour of the second. In both cases, the voter turnout was only 45 per cent, five per cent below the necessary validation point.

Last December, the Act was amended, making it easier to get a question on the ballot and lowering to only 25 per cent the voter turnout needed to make the results valid. This loosening of the rules has overshot the mark by a long stretch. It has created a situation that threatens not only Taiwan independence and sovereignty, but also regional peace and security.

It would be more to the point for Taiwan to address the fundamental problems with its constitution and political structure, which have been said, jokingly, to embody the worst aspects of the French and American systems.

It is difficult for Taiwan to do this, because, every time in the past when it has taken steps to reform its constitution, Beijing has gone ballistic, screamed that the island is seeking international recognition of its independence, and ramped up threats to invade. Yet Taiwan should bite the bullet and confront the reality that its political and government system is going to get increasingly dysfunctional unless reformed. If Taiwan’s constitution is left as it is, the Chinese Communist Party’s work will be done for it and the island will become increasingly vulnerable.

Taiwan’s constitution is a fantastical creation. It was written and adopted in December, 1947, in Nanking, China, then the capital of the Kuomintang government, which still controlled much of the mainland.

When Chiang and the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan in 1949, they claimed that this was now the base of the Republic of China and that the communists would soon be ousted from the mainland.

This never happened, but to enhance the fantasy that it was the real government of China, the Kuomintang created in Taiwan all the institutions set out in the Nanking Constitution.

There has been some whittling away of the structure, but not enough, and Taiwan remains overburdened with governing institutions.

Probably the most important distortion of the Nanking Constitution during its life on Taiwan, however, has been the shift in authority to the president from a predominantly parliamentary system.

Martial law was declared in Taiwan in March 1947 when Taiwanese rose up against the Kuomintang’s seizure of power after the Japanese colonial administration departed at the end of the Second World War. In 1948, the powers of the president were greatly enhanced to confront what was portrayed as a “communist rebellion,” and martial law continued until 1987.

Thus when Taiwan finally achieved democracy in the late 1980s after much anguish and repression, the political system it inherited was out of balance, with the presidency and the parliament in constant collision, even when the same party is in power in both places.

All around the world, from the U.S. to Zimbabwe, democracies based on executive presidencies are failing.

The best thing Taiwan could do to protect its democracy and its national sovereignty is to adopt a strong parliamentary system, which has proved to be the most representative, accountable, adaptable and sustainable democratic system devised so far.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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Jonathan Manthorpe is the author of “Forbidden Nation: A History of Taiwan,” published by Palgrave-Macmillan. He has been a foreign correspondent and international affairs columnist for nearly 40 years. He was European bureau chief for the Toronto Star and then Southam News in the late 1970s and the 1980s. In 1989 he was appointed Africa correspondent by Southam News and in 1993 was posted to Hong Kong to cover Asia. For the last few years he has been based in Vancouver, writing international affairs columns for what is now the Postmedia Group. He left the group last year and now writes for a range of newspapers and websites. [email protected]